Do you follow?

There seems to be a bit of an uprising going on in the blogosphere. Everybody seems to be turning off the nofollow tag. What is the nofollow tag you ask? Well, it’s a tag that goes into the specs of a link that the search engines came up with to indicate when a link was not to be spidered or followed by the search engine spider. Basically, you’re telling the search engine to not give the link any credence just because you link to it.

The problem with that is that many of the blogging tools like WordPress(the one I use here) integrated the nofollow link into all links in comments. They do it so that spam comments and the spammers that propagate them don’t get the link weight by spamming your comments. Sounds good. So why amd I saying it’s a problem?

Well, any legitimate comments that add to the conversation don’t get that link weight either. And if you leave a comment here and it adds to the conversation, I believe you should get that link weight. That’s why I turned nofollow off in my comments. That doesn’t give you a license to go about spamming my comments. I do moderate all new comments and will not think twice about deleting any comment that I feel is spammy.

That being said, feel free to add to the conversation and enter your URL in the comment form. You’ll be “follow”ed.

P.S. I use the doFollow plugin for WordPress 1.5+ to turn off the nofollow links.

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